[OH-Publicity] Talks for SCALE

[Asheesh Laroia]

On Tue, 4 Dec 2012, Mark Holmquist wrote:

>> Oh -- the other thing I did with Deb in 2011 was hand out flyers about
>> OpenHatch, and I got to chat with a user of the site and get some
>> feedback from her. So that was pretty fun! Oh, and I met Mark Holmquist
>> there! (-:
>
> And I intend to go as well, this year! It will be barrels of fun, 
> hopefully I'll give a bunch of cool-seeming talks that will turn out to 
> not be disasters, and we'll all have a great time. FWIW I've submitted 3 
> talks in a programming-type vein, so it should be better on that front 
> this year :)
>
> My proposed talks, which may or may not happen:
>
> * Making Game Content with Lua - A talk about minetest modding, which is 
> a great way to *start* programming, because you get to make cool stuff 
> with an easy language
>
> * Etherpad Lite Plugins for Great Justice - A talk about how to plug in 
> to Etherpad Lite's API, parts of which I helped write and most of which 
> I helped document. Should be a fun time! I'll gently introduce 
> JavaScript (well, as gently as I can do with that source material), and 
> talk about some of the cool stuff you can do.
>
> * Lua Scripting with MediaWiki - Another Lua talk, but this one's a bit 
> closer to home. Wikimedia has written a replacement engine for complex 
> templates, and it's coming. In some wikis, it's already active! This 
> will be another gentle introduction to programming in general, as well 
> as the specific topic at hand.
>
> * Free Gaming on GNU/Linux - This one is more user-oriented, but still 
> important! I'm doing this in my capacity as a member of the LibrePlanet 
> Gaming Collective.

These all sound awesome.

I have minor title suggestions, if you're interested. If not, please 
excuse the suggestions!

I would change the title of "Lua Scripting with MediaWiki" to "Scripting 
Wikis with Lua" or "Scripting Wiki Content with Lua" or "Scripting 
MediaWiki with Lua".

For "Making Game Content with Lua" can you be clearer in the title what 
people will learn? Like "Learn to program by making game objects (in 
Lua!)" for example.

For that matter, maybe "How I customized Etherpad Lite by writing plugins 
(and you can too)" for "Etherpad Lite Plugins for Great Justice", to show 
that you personally have experience with it. I realize I'm taking "for 
great justice" out of it, which you probably liked as a phrase.

I'm super excited about "Free Gaming on GNU/Linux" -- this is a perennial 
discussion topic, and it'd be great to see a solid talk that showed people 
the state of things now.

I think these would all be awesome.

-- Asheesh.